The present health care system is complicated and expensive. Furthermore, typical health care for an individual requires the individual, e.g. a patient, to travel to a doctor's office, urgent care center, and/or a hospital in order to be seen by a doctor, be administered tests, and the like. Such travel for the individual can be difficult and some testing for the patient could be self-administered if monitored or supervised in a desired manner.
According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), chronic diseases are the leading cause of death in the U.S. In fact, 7 out of 10 deaths among Americans each year are from chronic diseases. Heart disease, cancer and stroke account for more than 50% of all deaths each year. Chronic diseases such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and arthritis are among the most common, costly, and preventable of all health problems in the U.S. The Global Status report said so-called non-communicable diseases accounted for more than 36 m deaths in 2008, and is rapidly rising.
In response to the need of reducing health care costs, remote disease monitoring systems have been attempted. However, heretofore systems still require a nurse and/or doctor to review each and every piece of data provided by a patient in order to prescribe a treatment or treatment plan. Additionally many hospital re-admissions are the direct result of not following the discharge notes or not reacting timely to changes in the patient's condition. Therefore, an improved interactive remote disease monitoring system that can automatically suggest one or more treatment intervention protocols, alert a health care provider of a potential problem with a patient's health and the like would be desirable. Additionally, the system is implemented to create a more personal patient-physician relationship for the Care Coordination Team while encouraging self-management and individual responsibility, and thereby leading to mutual accountability. By creating intelligent, measurable, real-time, and data-driven health outcomes, reduced hospital re-admissions, improved quality of life and effective cost savings opportunities can be provided while at the same time affording better care coordination for nurse/clinician treatment teams and disease-specific self-monitoring and personalized care plans.
In addition to the above, medical devices as defined by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C), United States Code 201(h), are known and commonly used in providing health care to patients. For example, it has been estimated that approximately 100,000 defibrillators are implanted in the United States alone each year. Other types of implantable medical devices (IMDs) include pacemakers, insulin pumps, neurostimulators, and the like. In addition, such IMDs can feature wireless communication, however this is not required.
Heretofore systems for monitoring such medical devices have required patients to visit their doctor's office, a hospital, urgent care center, etc. Therefore, an interactive medical device monitoring and management system that provides intelligent, measurable, real-time, and data-driven health decisions would reduce hospital re-admissions and improve quality of life with effective cost savings opportunities for patients. Naturally, such a system would be desirable.